A fortnight afterwards we finished the work, but before we left our jolly little camp we had a football Saturday. The Sikhs came down in force, and licked the little Ghurkas all to smithereens.
"They must a 'ad some un to teach 'em 'ow to charge, sir," said Private Flanigan sorrowfully to the captain.
The captain looked at me, and I looked at the captain. But I said nothing, for Flanigan had been as sober as a judge since I found him.
[REX ET IMP:]
I
"Rex will get on all right," said Muriel Alexander pettishly, "you know quite well, Horace, that so long as he has old Bisvâs he wants nothing else. Look at him now! He is quite happy, and the old man would die rather than let any harm happen to the child."
Horace Alexander frowned slightly as he looked through the wide set door of his office room to the verandah beyond. It was a very neat, natty, office room, severely correct and Western in its pigeon-holes, its files, its elegant upholstered chair at the further side of the writing table ready for the confidential visitor. No guns defiled it; no tennis bats, no half-used box of cigars, no general litter of unofficial male humanity such as most Indian office rooms in the past have permitted, was to be seen within the precincts sacred to duty, for Horace Alexander was that curious product of modern times, a clever and advanced man, bent upon progress, who stickles for the commonplace conventional etiquette in all things. So he stirred uneasily at the sight he saw beyond his office doors, dropped his eye-glasses and put them on again petulantly.
Yet it was rather a pretty sight.
A red-haired, fuzzy-headed child of four or five, small, but strong and sturdy, seated with the utmost dignity oh a red velvet cushion, his broad freckled face wearing an expression of conscious majesty, part of which was doubtless due to the insecurity of a gilt paper band which was perched on his goldy-red curls.
Before him, in an attitude of prayerful adoration, squatted a very very old man. At his full height he must still have been tall, and the bent shoulders were broad; broad enough to show up the line of war-medals on the breast of his orderly's coat. They gave the new scarlet cloth a certain personal cachet and toned down its official garishness.